Work Experience: A Day in the Life

Dexter Robinson is an Acting student from BOA, and came down to spend a week with us at Flatpack HQ to learn about what we do. Here are some snippets from his work experience - scroll on to learn about the life of a Flatpacker, from Dexter's POV.

Now, I don’t want to be the cliché work experience kid talking about how all we do is make tea, but when I arrived at Flatpack HQ on my first day, I didn’t really know what to expect other than tea-making and watching short films. Luckily, there was a lot more to my work experience week than that.

I spent my first day meeting the team, and then getting an introduction to event production with Lucy Hill and going on and trying to plan a film night with a budget of £1000, which ended up being a showing of The Breakfast Club at the outdoor cinema at MAC Birmingham. As well as this, I worked on researching Outdoor Cinema in the Midlands, learning about ticket prices, location, appeal and competition.

Tuesday was somewhat similar, but with a lot more film-watching and a lot less finance – I was working with Amy Smart to try to plan a half an hour long short film night for 15-17 year olds, but this was a lot harder than I expected it to be at first. A turn out, finding 30 minutes of animations that all have similar themes isn’t the easiest of tasks. After 3 different attempts at having short films that link together I ended up with 4 different short films that weren’t alike in any way.

Wednesday was a weird one. I ended up spending the day archiving films from hard drives, and was exposed to some interesting stuff, to say the least. For example, I stumbled upon Leslie The Pony Has An A+ Day, which at a first look seemed like an entirely innocent short film about a pony having an A+ Day. It was not. The film begins in a very light-hearted style, following Lesley’s trip to the castle of Merryville, where she meets the Duke, who is getting a divorce. Lesley then goes on a rampage around Merryville after having a sudden change of heart, but also tickles elves and eats macaroons during this rampage. On another note, for lunch on Wednesday the whole Flatpack team went for a really nice pizza at Baked In Brick in Digbeth.

Thursday was a completely different type of work but I really enjoyed it – I was working with Keenia Dyer-Williams on the social media side of Flatpack, learning about how Flatpack does Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and basically any marketing for anything. Trying to get a photo I could post on Flatpack’s Instagram on a rainy day in Digbeth in February was a challenge.

On Friday, I got to have a go at some camera work, doing video tutorials for how to put together bits of kit like projectors, DVD players etc. This was an interesting thing to try as I’d never really done anything like it.

Work experience at Flatpack was a really good experience and I learnt about a lot more different areas of the festival and the industry that I initially expected to – I’ve been exposed to a lot of jobs that I didn’t know existed and I’m now aware of a lot more options that I didn’t know were there to begin with. Everyone was lovely to work with and I’m really glad I took the opportunity.